Her name was Harriet

If you like movies about superheroes, watch this one. If you like movies based on real people with real struggles, real emotions, real losses and real victories, watch this one. If you like rescue movies, watch this one. If you like movies about people who change the course of history, watch this one.

The movie is Harriet, and it’s the beautifully crafted story of—in the words of director Kasi Lemmons—a “very small, very strong, very fierce…badass woman,” a woman who became a Moses to her people.

The Harriet Tubman of this film, played brilliantly by Cynthia Erivo, is a traumatized teenager enslaved on a tidewater plantation in Maryland. Abused as a house slave, she has been sent to work in the fields and woods with the men. Her knowledge of the land and the inland waterways will prove invaluable.

Following months of recovery from a blow to the head, and after seeing her sisters sold away to pay their owner’s debts, she bids farewell to her family and strikes out for freedom. Soon her owner and his posse are in pursuit. Miraculously, crossing rivers, hiding in thickets, she makes it to the border.

Scenes from the film will stay with you, such as when Harriet pauses on a hillside at sunrise and looks across into the free state of Pennsylvania. Arriving in Philadelphia, she is sheltered, fed and given a job by abolitionists in Philadelphia. Here, she learns to walk with her head up, as a free woman. Yet she pines for the family she has left behind, and it isn’t long before she sneaks back into Maryland’s eastern shore to steal them away.

No longer the timid slave girl, she now leads parents and siblings, cousins and friends to freedom. In one scene, trapped by dogs and bounty hunters, she wades into the river, her pistol lifted above her head, almost submerging before she climbs out on the other side. The slaves, including a mother and infant, follow.

In another daring rescue, Harriet is chased down by her former owner, Gideon Brodess. In the violent exchange that follows, he boasts that he will always own her. “You’re wrong,” she replies before she escapes again. “God don’t mean people to own people.”

In the months to come, Harriet settles her parents in Auburn, N.Y., and leads others across the border into Canada. Wary of bounty hunters, she shows up at abolitionist meetings in Boston and elsewhere, and raises money for, among others, John Brown.

Most people know about her rescue of other slaves. Not many know that during the Civil War, she volunteered with the Union Army, working as a cook, nurse, spy and scout. On June 1, 1863, as historian Kate Clifford Larson writes, Harriet Tubman “became the first woman to plan and execute an armed expedition during the Civil War.”

Sailing upriver Union soldiers crept through the mist to set afire plantation buildings and crops, while others rallied the slaves to the riverside. No one had ever seen anything like it, as a rush of humanity defied Confederate guns to reach the Union boats. By nightfall, 730 enslaved men, women and children had been rescued.

If ever there were doubt, or confusion about what the Civil War was about, Harriet, filmed on a former plantation in Virginia, makes it clear. More than that, Harriet shows us how inextricably we are connected to each other today, and for the better.

Harriet is a movie about a small, gutsy, God-fearing woman who played a pivotal role in the fight for freedom. It’s an essential American story, and every American should see it.